I’m at a Mission India conference. The president of the West Michigan Christian Foundation, Randy Veltkamp, made a presentation this afternoon at which he suggested it could be a very creative and wise aspect of estate planning to open a DAF–a donor-advised fund–even if and as one has no funds to put into it at the moment.

Why?

Because the DAF can serve as a kind of low-cost guarantor that one’s charitable preferences can be updated on a continual basis without having to pay an attorney to revise one’s final documents. Write the DAF into your attorney-drafted documents as the recipient of a certain portion of your estate, then let the DAF designate the specific final recipients of those funds. If and as your personal preferences for recipients change, modify your DAF’s designations at no charge. . . .

Smart!

[NOTE: As I have been urged by our investment advisor, however--and something I realize our estate planning attorney has never encouraged us to do in the 10 years since he drafted our documents!--you should regularly review and, as necessary, modify your final documents to ensure they still reflect your heartfelt preferences and desires. The DAF suggestion, here, may "simply" relieve you of some of the necessity to modify.]

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 1:36 pm and is filed under charity, estate planning, legacy planning, settling an estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.